Extreme Money

The human race created money and finance. But our inventions re-create us. Mankind mistook money-a lubricant of society and human well-being-for an end in itself. Finance, the monetary shadow of real things, came to dominate human reality. Extreme Money tells the story of how this happened. In so doing; it also tells the story of the modern world. Bestselling author Satyajit Das draws on thirty-three years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, Ponzi prosperity, sophistication and wealth, while endangering the jobs, possessions and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry. You’ll learn how everything from home mortgages to climate change has become financialized, as vast fortunes are generated by individuals who build nothing of lasting value. Das shows how ‘extreme money’ has become even more unreal; how ‘voodoo banking’ continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of ‘Masters of the Universe’ has come to dominate the world.